Humans in Space: 10 Amazing Spacewalk Photos

Shuttle astronauts began the first of five spacewalks slated for this fourth and final servicing mission on the Hubble Space Telescope at 8:52 a.m. Eastern time Thursday. They installed a new wide-field camera and swapped out a data router that began malfunctioning in September of last year. Two astronauts are shown above approaching Hubble on NASA TV.

But no matter what the astronauts are doing, any Shuttle crew’s extravehicular activities are awe-inspiring and mesmerizing. In this Wired Science mini-gallery, we trace the history of the spacewalk with photos from NASA.

The Soviets beat Americans to spacewalking. On March 18, 1965, Aleksey Leonov became the first human to walk in space. The image is a still from the external movie camera attached to his vessel, the Soviet Voskhod 2.

Ed White, the first American to walk in space, hangs out during the Gemini 4 mission. He's attached to the craft by both umbilical and tether lines.

When a piece of the International Space Station's solar array was torn in November 2007, astronaut Scott Parazynski took a ride on the station's robotic arm to patch up the live electrical panel. That wild maneuver kept enough juice flowing to the station to support the full battery of international experiments.